Megan Fox makes her return to the action film arena, in Rogue. This time around she’s playing more than just the sultry love interest, as she heads up a team of mercenaries on a mission in Africa; her team has been paid to rescue the daughter of a rich conservationist. The mission is a success, but as the group hide out with their bounty, they find themselves under attack from both rebel forces and an angry pride of lionesses.
Rogue sounds like a lot of fun on paper. Man versus beast movies are almost always exciting, even if they’re not particularly well put together. There’s always an exception to the rule though, and Rogue is a clear example. It’s watchable, but there’s just not enough about it to truly stimulate the viewer. We join Fox’s team’s moments before they launch their rescue mission, therefore having no time at all to find out much about the group. Once the extraction has been completed, and the team are waiting on their lift out of enemy territory, we still don’t get to know that much about the characters. All we really learn about any of them through the course of the story is that the men aren’t thrilled to have Fox’s character, Sam, as their leader and they all enjoy a sing song of The Backstreet Boys’ ‘Backstreet’s Back’. With so little character background or development, Rogue feels like little more than a series of sequences with people running around firing guns.
Even the lionesses, the unexpected threat, are sidelined, popping up out of nowhere every now and then to take down one of the team. There’s little explanation as to why the creatures are attacking or why they’re so hard to stay away from. The animals spend the bulk of their time outside the compound that the team are hiding in, so why they keep popping out on their own, when they know the animals are stalking around outside, is rather unclear. These decisions ultimately make the film feel rather silly, but unfortunately not silly enough to push the film into crazy creature feature territory. Instead, the whole thing just feels undercooked and lacklustre.
Sold to the masses as Megan Fox versus lions, Rogue doesn’t feature much of either. Sadly it has neither the high stakes Crawl-level fun of woman versus beast, nor the cat and mouse, hunter becomes the hunted, thrills of The Ghost and the Darkness. Rogue instead falls into tried and tired ‘mercenaries in trouble’ tropes, and in doing so, becomes instantly forgettable.
Rogue is on Digital Download 9 November and DVD 16 November.
Rogue
Summary
An intriguing high-concept premise is squandered in favour of sticking to safe and overdone action thriller tropes.
